Journalling – why has it become so popular? The Artist’s Way from a Christian perspective

I came across an old spiral bound notebook in a box.  From back when I was starting to have a daily quiet time, and as I worked through In Understanding Be Men I jotted down my answers to the daily questions.

Today. we’d call that ‘journalling’, and if you type that into YouTube you’ll find videos with over a million views.

There are several plausible reasons why it’s come roaring in as a discipline.

One is that there is a rising popularity in the group of ancient philosophers called the Stoics.

We can talk about why this is happening and how Christians might respond another time (I have ideas!). But fundamental to Stoic thought is a daily practice of journalling, to reflect on the day and learn its lessons.  YouTube will show you that pretty quickly.

If the Stoics are popular, so will be journaling.

A second reason is that there are some really cool options easily available for the actual journals.  We’re not stuck with black notebooks.  You can choose some really well-made options that make the practice pleasurable.  See below.

A third might be that there’s lots of encourage to draw, paint, doodle, colour as a journalling habit.  That would drive a decent Stoic mad, and it’s not my way, but it’s a popular way of doing it.

A fourth is that there are some gorgeous Christian resources which are targeted to encourage the habit.  Journalling Bibles are published, both for writing and for drawing: Crossway alone lists over twenty options.

But it’s the fifth which is the principal driver, I reckon.

The Artist’s Way

Back in the 1980s, the writer, poet, teacher, filmmaker Julia Cameron began teaching a course which encouraged people who wanted to write (or be otherwise creative) but felt blocked.  The course grew in popularity and was eventually published in 1992 as The Artist’s Way. That has now sold over five million copies, and is in over forty languages.

Structurally, it takes its readers through a twelve-week programme of artistic ‘recovery’ (if you’re hearing echoes of AA in that, you’re not wrong – there is a strong pattern of ‘brokenness-needing-healing’ here).  There are chapters to guide each week, and each chapter is engagingly broken into mini essays.  You can read the whole chapter in one, or take it slow. There are tasks to prompt you, and check-ins to hold yourself accountable

Alongside that, the reader turns into writer, with a practice called ‘Daily Pages’.  The is a free flow-ing practice of pen on paper, to fill three pages each day with stream of consciousness thought, reflection, creating, clearing the mind.

I’m going to do a separate blog post on the impact of these pages and what it’s for.

For the moment notice that a book that has sold in the millions only repays the price of buying it if you start to journal.

I had to have a go

I’ll put my hand up here, and decided that if I was going to review it then I had to plunge in and immerse myself.  I’ve done the full Artist’s Way journey twice, and similarly worked through the companion Write for Life, which is focused just for writers. I now have a little collection of Traveller’s Notebooks, which I’ve written in with my Twsbe Eco fountain pen, filled with turquoise ink called ku-jaku, manufactured by iroshizuku.  

It might as well be nice.

So, the most superficial review is that for those of us who use words to communicate, this can be a really interesting and useful exercise.  Slow that down — we pastors use words to communicate to others.  We read, study, think and express ourselves so that other people might understand.  It’s a precious and important role.

What we don’t tend to do us to use words to communicate to ourselves.  That sounds weird so let me try again — journalling forces me to put into words what I am actually thinking, and then to nuance, process, find better words for what’s on my mind.  There’s no agenda in Cameron’s process, but it is remarkably useful how putting pen to paper, even if its starts as trivially as noting what the weather is, can minutes later have crystallised into thinking hard about how a meeting went, what Im anxious about, remembering what I’ve forgotten.

I’ve enjoyed that, and I will keep it — but let’s press closer.

A Spiritual Path

Cameron’s full title is The Artist’s Way – A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity.  Hmm.

The book repeatedly and explicitly makes claims that this process is a spiritual one. We are encountering ‘The Great Creator.’

Hear her in the introduction:

‘Because The Artist’s Way is, in essence, a spiritual path, initiated and practiced through creativity, this book uses the word God. This may be volatile than some of you – conjuring old, unworkable, unpleasant, or simply unbelievable ideas about God as you were raised to understand “him”.  Please be open-minded. 

‘Remind yourself that to succeed in this course, no god concept is necessary. In fact, many of our commonly held god concepts get in the way.… 

‘When the word God is used in these pages, you may substitute the thought good orderly direction or flow. What we are talking about is a creative energy. God is a useful shorthand for many of us, but so is Goddess, Mind, Universe, Source, and Higher Power… The point is not what you name it. The point is that you try using it.’ Xviii-xix 

And those terms, and many other similar ones, are threaded through almost every page of the process.

This is a major problem for many of her non-religious readership.  I’m writing as a Brit here — this language is way too ‘goddy’ for the average C21 would-be author.  If you go to Amazon you can see her massive number of reviews and the overwhelmingly positive nature of them.  Bt if you read the three-star reviews, which is where the thoughtful dissent always happens, you’ll find that time and again it’s this ‘spiritual’ dimension which is the stumbling block.

And she can’t just trim it out, because she is persuaded that this Higher Power is in some way engaged in our artistic production, the Creator engaged in creation, and that to make it a purely secular narrative would be impossible.  Somehow she has to retain this layer of meaning.

We Christians are coming from the opposite direction: it’s simply not goddy enough.

What do I mean?  Well, your hackles will have risen at various points in the section I just quoted. A lower case ‘god’. A capitalised ‘Goddess’.  An ‘it’.

What we have to say from the outset, therefore, is that whatever Cameron means by the word God,  it is a long way from the self-revealing Triune God of the scriptures, the loving Saviour stretched out on the cross, the loving Spirit poured into our hearts.

Christianity is credal and confessional – it knows no other way.

Christianity is credal and confessional – it knows no other way.

So we need to put on out theological thinking caps to make sense of this. Because many in our churches, especially the blocked creatives, will find this immensely appealing.

Too goddy

The fundamental issue is one that Reformed theology insists on: the distinction between Saving Grace and Common Grace.  

Common Grace is God’s loving care and provisions for every human on the planet: the fiercest atheist still enjoys the warmth of the sun and the pleasure of a fresh flower.  We are massively wonderful beings, we humans, gifted with enormous creative potential, and we take pleasure in the exercise of those gifts. You can knowingly reject Christianity, and still love writing a poem, baking a cake or composing a symphony.

This is the field that Cameron is playing in, and I think we may have done her and her ilk a disservice if we have implied that it is a small, dusty and infertile one.  Unbelievers produce jaw-dropping, majestic words of art in this field, which they make, and we enjoy, with deep delight.

So what is going on here, spiritually? Well, it’s to do with the image of God. Every human being is made with God’s image in place, and the Fall has distorted, shattered defaced, but not erased it.  

A child playing in the ruins of a bombed cathedral can still find pieces of medieval stained glass, or torn pages of the music from the choir, that have a deep resonance in the present, however much they might be ripped from the past.  They child may not be able to reconstruct, or even imagine, what has been lost, but the ruins can still evoke awe. So with human greatness — even its shattered state it still has a majesty and power.

What Cameron calls ‘spiritual’ I therefore what to say is actually what it means to be made human.  We are designed to have a relationship with the living God, and this relational capacity is what she is exploring — the relational capacity of being made in the image of, and for, our Creator.  

What she calls the Creator within, is actually the created, creative human within, deeply echoing but looking for its lost Creator.

We are both like him, which is why we create, and we are longing for him, which is why our creation cannot satisfy.  What she identifies as the Creator within, is actually the created human within, deeply echoing but looking for its lost Creator.

She hasn’t discovered God. She’s discovered how breathtakingly deep and wonderful it is to be even the fallen Image of God.

Not goddy enough

The other Grace is Saving Grace – the gospel.  The richness and glory of redemption.

You don’t need me to rehearse that for you, but to underline that it is extraordinarily, infinitely wonderful and entrancing.

Saving Grace does not make Common Grace unnecessary – we still need rain and sunshine.  And as restored Image-bearers, we need to show what it is like when Common Grace is properly aligned with Saving Grace, and the Creation is properly aligned with the Saving Creator.

So my frustration with Cameron is that what she describes as god at work in her creative process is stunningly less-but-more than that.  ‘Less’, because what she has discovered how wondrous it is to have the creative potential of a human, made in the mage of an infinitely Creative God.  

And ‘more’, because if only she could turn away from being troubled by the tattered fragments of her Christianised upbringing, and turn towards a rich biblical orthodoxy, she should find a richer, free-er, infinitely more loving and creative relationship waiting for her, not just different in scale but different in kind to what she could ever imagine.

Creative Christians should be modelling that.

Have you read Cameron?  What did you make of the book? Pile in!

Resources

Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity (London: Souvenir Press, 2020)

Julia Cameron, Write for Life:  a Toolkit for Writers (London: Souvenir Press, 2023)